Random ideas

Manish Sabharwal is a giant in emerging skill making subject. He has a piece in the Mint where he says that:

• “Public policy education has not taken off in India because of the lack of an entry ramp into real policy action; even the small window that got us Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and finance commission chairman Vijay Kelkar is now closed.
• And any thinking about fixing public policy human capital has to include politicians, because there is some truth in the cynical comment that the only highways to get ahead in Indian politics are either genetic or geriatric. The problem is complex but, as Lant Pritchett at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government says, the Indian state’s inability to deliver outcomes ranks as one of the world’s top 10 biggest problems— right up there with AIDS and climate change.”

Thomas Sowell on disaster government groupies:

• “Nothing has torn more countries apart from inside like racial and ethnic polarization. Just this year, a decades-long civil war, filled with unspeakable atrocities, has finally ended in Sri Lanka. The painful irony is that, when the British colony of Ceylon became the independent nation of Sri Lanka in 1948, its people were considered to be a shining example for the world of good relations between a majority (the Sinhalese) and a minority (the Tamils). That all changed when politicians decided to "solve" the "problem" that the Tamil minority was much more economically successful than the Sinhalese majority. Group identity politics led to group preferences and quotas that escalated into polarization, mob violence and ultimately civil war.
• Group identity politics has poisoned many other countries, including at various times Kenya, Czechoslovakia, Fiji, Guyana, Canada, Nigeria, India, and Rwanda. In some countries the polarization has gone as far as mass expulsions or civil war.”

David Brooks on “The Power of Posterity”

Parth J Shah on education bill:

• “While evaluating the Education Bill, ask yourself this question: What has changed since the Bill got introduced? The answer is: Nothing. The same bureaucracy is in charge today, there is nothing on governance standards or on the use of independent assessments of learning outcomes. So, it is difficult to see just what the new bill hopes to achieve and how it plans to improve education outcomes in the country.”